LibreOffice 6.1.5.2. Will not allow update attempts

Have tried various versions also of the updates available and each time it comes to an impass and will not allow an update to continue or complete.

LibreOffice 6.3.4 is available.

This is a windows 8.1 x64 desktop system…

Totally delete and then place a new version in??

Yes/No. I’ve never been able to get the update to work (I’m on Win7x63). I always reinstall over the old one. Just be careful with the profile.

Hello,

well, the build-in update function does not work (yet).

Way to proceed is

  1. download needed version from libreoffice.org
  2. go to control panel > programms and functions > select installed LibreOffice > deinstall
  3. this leaves the LO profile as it is - it will not be removed, all your user-data remains
  4. install previously downloaded version

Stay with the previous bitness. In case you had 32 bit, stay with 32 bit version. Or if you used 64 bit version, reinstall 64 bit version.

An update installation direct over the installed version may also work but better is IMO a ‘clean up’ with deinstallation before installing a newer version.

Regards

Cookievore

Stay with the previous bitness

While there might be cases where this is reasonable, there are also cases where the opposite is preferable. So what this advise is based upon?

Hello Mike, first of all I thought about JRE / Base. Unconscious switching ot the bitness could cause problems with the function of base afterwards. In particular for a user that already quarrels with an LO update process. Also if one would try to run 64-bit install on a 32-bit system this would lead to avoidable irritation. So I thought fewest problems will occure when recognizing this and choosing the same again.

Also, but more from a gut feeling, I wouldn’t trust the install process with implemented hidden uninstall - as you explain - for as rocksolid as one could wish when implicitly switching again unconscious from 32 to 64 bit or the other way. But admitted this ist not a hard fact.

Best

Ahm, why did my comment change the order of the answers so that now not Mikes’ answer is in first position but mine again? His answer is much more detailed and certainly more reasonable and newer anyway. Was the ask bot system updated somehow? Really unwise.

LibreOffice installation process is currently designed to:

  1. Collect information about currently installed features (if present).
  2. Ask user to refine the selected features.
  3. Run normal uninstall of previous LibreOffice (if present).
  4. Install the selection.

So in general, it is preferable to install LibreOffice over existing version, to automatically keep the same set of components without need to select them again (where user has a non-standard set). In all cases, the old version will be uninstalled prior to installation of new version, the same way as would happen manually. (By the way, this is somewhat unfortunate, because it slows down the installation process, removes pinned items, and disallows to rollback to previous working state when uninstallation of old version has succeeded, but new version failed to install for some reason; but that is not related to the uninstallation/installation process being joined; the same would happen if the two be separated, and this unfortunate operation is also fortunate in other sense, because the concerns about “it’s safer to manually uninstall older than install newer” are unwarranted).

No installation/uninstallation process touches any user profiles: they are created/updated by LibreOffice process (when you run the installed program), not by installer.

In cases where something wrong happens (MSI errors), there’s a FAQ that lists some of available options; and one of them is “Use troubleshooter tool from Microsoft”, which is the tool MS has created to fix numerous errors that happen during the work of the system service. Note that that’s a general-purpose tool, existing due to the inherent flaws of the Windows Installer service, and not specific to LibreOffice installer.

About “staying with the previous bitness”, which @Cookievore suggested: I don’t think it actually has solid foundation. If you have 64-bit system, you likely would be better served by 64-bit LibreOffice; so the choice is more based on your system architecture, not on previous LibreOffice architecture. There are rare cases where your choice of LibreOffice architecture was dictated by e.g. availability of ODBC drivers for the platform; but in that case, you likely clearly know what you need and why.

All that relates to the case when you have a failure during installation, to try to let you see the picture and find a solution. If your problem is that you are trying to update using automatic updater, then, as @Cookievore mentions, it only notifies about existing updates, and user needs to download and launch the installer manually.